


A Portrait of a Soucriant as a Young Woman

by tehtarik



Category: Byzantium (2012)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape, POV Second Person, Violence, ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-16
Updated: 2018-10-16
Packaged: 2019-08-03 01:08:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16316213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tehtarik/pseuds/tehtarik
Summary: You’re Eleanor Webb. You write this over and over. Your truths can be torn flocks of birds in the wind. Or stones thrown into the sea. But your name must stay. Like a headstone. How fitting, because isn’t a headstone meant to commemorate?Eleanor is a writer, a portrait, a soucriant.(Only a woman can be a soucriant. Only a woman can be so hated).





	A Portrait of a Soucriant as a Young Woman

 

 

 

Always start with your name. This is the only way. Everything after can plait itself into a liar’s tongue. But not your name, Eleanor Webb.

 _Eleanor Webb_ was the correct answer in the draughty schoolroom with twelve desks and barely enough ink, or whenever there were visitors at North Haven Private Orphanage. Slick suited men, patrons of the orphanage who never seemed to do much but visit. Nuns from the convent on the outskirts, come to deliver catechism classes. The vicar and other parish officials. What is your name, girl? What have you got to tell us? Recite your psalms. Read your lines. Start with your name.

At a graffiti-scrawled bus stop, a woman in a peach-coloured tutu and skin-thin shoes tried to kindle a conversation with you. It was past midnight and you could see the jelly-pink insides of her eyelids, sagging wetly. She forgot to ask your name.

“I’m Eleanor Webb,” you told her.

So you are.

You must always be Eleanor Webb.

Clara, on the other hand, can be Claire, English Rose Claire with that windswept radiance. Or she can be Charlotte bound by a corset, dagger-heeled, notes sticking out of her satin garters. Or Cathy from the moors, shrilling with wind and fire. Or her personal favourite, Camilla, lifted right out of Le Fanu’s _Carmilla_ . When _Carmilla_ was published, she brought home each issue of the serial and you read them to her.

“Good bedtime reading, but what a load of fucking bollocks,” Clara said when you'd finished reading them all. She tossed them all into the fire because the it was an iron-grey January and you were both shivering together in bed. Neither of your bodies generated warmth for each other.

You’re Eleanor Webb. You write this over and over. Your truths can be torn flocks of birds in the wind. Or stones thrown into the sea. But your name must stay. Like a headstone. How fitting, because isn’t a headstone meant to commemorate?

Remember this: Eleanor Webb is linear. Eleanor Webb is a history of her own self. You must never swerve to the whims of Clara’s curving trajectories. They are not for you: her endless mothering, her shifting guises, the iterations of lives she insists are necessary. You split through Clara’s lies. You see through her.

You are written by your stories. Carry on, Eleanor Web.

 

\-----

 

Frank can barely hold himself upright by the time you and him reach the top of the island.  Most of his spindling zigzag weight is hooked over your back and shoulders, and his toes barely scrape the ground. All around are the spidery waterfalls, salt-tanged and bad to drink, tumbling off the cliffs into the sea, shredding against a razor-sharp beach.

Among these waterfalls is the hovel of a shrine: beehive-round, with a doorway slitted into the stone. You lead Frank right to the entrance.

“Ella,” he says, “Tell me again what it was like. What do I see -- do I look for? Am I supposed to look for -- to--to say something. Announce my presence? You've told me so little.”

The truth?

“You will die,” you say, “the same way others will die by your hand.”

He holds out his hand, and you slide yours into his palm. Your thumbnail grows against his sick pulse, nicks the side of his finger, and draws blood. Frank runs his own thumb along the rim of your talon. You lift his hand to your mouth and lick the wound.

“If I don't come out?”

“I'll bury you,” you promise. “A proper burial. Anywhere you want.”

“Huh,” he says. “Thought you were going to say, you know-- that you'd come looking for me. Maybe save me or something.”

“I’m sorry. That is not possible.”

The sky is black with clouds of wheeling jackdaws. Ravens squalling. Frank goes through the doorway, and as he descends the stairway, a column of bats rises and joins the flocks above.

You wait and the waterfalls turn red. The spray turns to scarlet mist, dyeing your clothes and hair and skin the same colour.

Later, you lie next to him on the hills, hand in hand.

His eyes are wide and he looks up into the sun directly, even though it must hurt him.

“I feel great. Except--” he breaks off, grasping at his throat. “I need to--how, how do I stop this?”

“You eat. You drink. You keep on living,” you say, and he looks afraid.

 

\-----

 

These same hills and cliffs were climbed, more than two hundred years ago, by your hands and knees. Your nightgown tore on the rocks, the fabric stained with your own blood and Ruthven’s.

You'll never be able to forget Ruthven (you’ll never be able to learn how Clara does it). Ruthven with his throat opened up in the corridor of the orphanage. The name Ruthven flits through your thoughts and you hear the clunk of his goosehead mahogany cane. You see his gimpy foot.

Ruthven came for you because of the foot. Because a long time ago, Clara, his once-favourite harlot, crouched beneath a baize table, cocked his own pistol and shot him in the knee.

It was Clara who brought you to the island. Back then, she was still a stranger to you.

For many months and years in the orphanage, you thought her a dream. A face in the skylight. A voice that ran high and sweet and sang tunes that weren’t hymns.

You stopped walking. You were in tears. The world was wrong. You didn’t understand any of this. Ruthven. Clara. The ghost at the window every night.

“Who are you?” you said to Clara.

“I have so much to tell you. After we do this.” She cradled your face, then pulled you into a hug. Her hands were cold. “I’m your mother, Ella. It was I who named you. I paid for your upkeep in gold.”

You had never even seen gold before. The things you had at the orphanage: one bonnet and two dresses (one of them for Sundays only), a Bible, and Darvell’s pearl. This was the pearl strung around your neck when the Matron discovered you on the doorstep in the middle of the night, a newborn baby swathed in two eiderdowns.

At the doorway of the shrine, the rooks whirring in wide circles overhead, Clara kissed you on both cheeks, and on your forehead and then on your mouth for courage. A cross of kisses that cooled on your flesh and felt more like the imprints of teeth.

The Nameless Saint was waiting for you at the bottom of the steps. It had chosen your shape, your face, your nightgown with the bloodstains on the lap, your skin still patched with the bruises from Ruthven's hand.

When you touched its cheek and lifted its gaze to meet yours, it said, _this is the end of all time for you, Eleanor Webb_ , and caught you in its grasp, held you as it opened up your jugular, and then your carotid artery. Your vision bled away.

How long you lay there on the floor of that hut, pulseless and sightless, you'll never know. But you rose again.

You leached back into the pallor of eternal life and Clara was there. It was she who cleaned the blood of your dress and picked you off the ground.

In between her deceptively fragile sobs, she said, “Truly, you _are_ my daughter. Ella, I will never let go of you again.”

She really should have said, _you’ll never be free of me again, Ella_.

Clara held you, kissing you, cradling you for the first time since you were born, since you wormed into life, wrenching apart her narrow pelvic bones and severing your way out of her flesh until she screamed and screamed and swore to kill you the moment you sucked in your first blue breath.

(Later you wrote, _but love confounded her_ )

The stars shattered their light into your eyes. The salt in the air cut the insides of your nostrils. Every passing breeze was ragged glass against your skin. And you thirsted. You hungered and you thirsted and Clara, twice your mother, was not enough. Years. Centuries, before she would ever be enough.

 

\-----

 

The brotherhood has ways of finding you. Somehow, their contempt for you exceeds their hatred of Clara by an order of magnitude.

The men from the brotherhood come after you, always men, always and ever will be men.

They come with their antiquated swords from Byzantium to decapitate you, with their urns of aromatic oils to burn your corpse to a crisp, decontaminate you and make fragrant the sacrilege of your ashes.

Each time, Clara and Darvell come to your rescue. Neither you nor Frank can kill your own kind like Clara or Darvell can.

“Will. These. Fuckers. Ever go extinct?” Clara says one day, as she drives a crowbar through one of the men’s throats, twists it sharply and then kicks the convulsing body to the ground.

Darvell extracts a handkerchief from his pocket, and when she nods without looking at him, he dabs the red from her forehead. “The brotherhood are relentless. They cannot change. If they are fixated on the idea of killing you, then they will keep hunting you and Eleanor until they exhaust their numbers.”

Clara pushes Darvell’s hand away. She rounds on you and Frank.

“What the fuck, Ella,” says Clara, furious. “Second time in six months.”

“They’re good at finding us.”

“They’re good at finding you because you’re in the same godforsaken town as last time. Every time they find you, you run, understand? You run to the other side of the fucking country. You pack your shit up, throw away your name, catch the last bus out of town and never look back. How fucking hard can that be?”

You flare up at her. “I won’t live like we used to. How _can_ we? There’s nothing that can be built upon that kind of life.”

Clara's face is pinched with fury. “All these years -- all that trouble to protect you and you're fool enough that some bastard’s going to hack your stupid thick head off your neck anyway.”

Neither Frank nor Darvell interrupt. When you and Clara are in the same room together, there isn’t space for either of them, or anyone else.

But later, Darvell tells you in private, “Nothing in the world matters to her except you. So we both keep an eye on you.”

“Well, you shouldn’t.”

How dearly Darvell clings to Clara, just like how you and Clara clung to each other before. In Clara’s stories, he was the quietly gallant soldier, Midshipman Darvell from the royal naval fleet, with his dark blue waistcoat and epaulettes, gifting her a pearl in exchange for a taste of the cockles she had dug out of the sand. Clara never called him weak, but he was indeed weak. He follows her so faithfully now, doing his penance for the time he forsook her because of loyalty to Ruthven or to the brotherhood. But that's Clara. Stay with her long enough, and she’ll inspire courage. Either that, or rebellion.

 

\-----

 

You met a child named Anne over a garden hedge. She had been pushing a pram around her garden, inching further and further away from her governess, when she saw you watching her.

She peeled back the embroidered coverlet over her pram and showed you her doll nestled inside. It was a large china doll with thick brown ringlets of hair. The girl named Anne was proud of her doll. The hair was real, you see, it was made from the hair of her sister who'd died of consumption two years ago.

In return, you told her some of your stories. About the Nameless Saint. About your effervescent mother who charmed the coins out of men’s pockets, and about the lives you counted every time you fed.

For three months you spoke nothing but the truth over the hedge.

Then autumn arrived and the bitter winds blew in from the sea and the girl named Anne begged you to take her with you.

“I don't want to go inside ever again. My mother only embroiders and plays the piano. She is nothing like you or your mother,” she said earnestly.

“Are you quite sure?” you asked. You had never taken anyone quite so young. “Everything I have told you is true.”

She crossed her arms over her heart. “I am quite sure.”

So you bade her climb over the hedge away from her governess’s line of sight, to a nearby copse. You blessed her. You told her, _may you have peace._ She wept. You licked away her tears and you ate her.

 

\-----

 

The next time you and Frank find Clara and Darvell, there is a train passing between you and them. Clara is a sequence, spluttering through a blur of speeding windows. She’s a gasping story. She’s waving crazily, skipping on the spot, shouting, _Ella! Ella! Over here, Ella!_

Darvell is beside her, looking amused but wise enough not to comment.

 _“_ Should I -- yeah, I should -- give you some space,” says Frank, who has never forgotten how Clara tried to kill him once.

The train passes and you're in her arms, or she's in yours, right there in the middle of the tracks.

All four of you end up taking the next train.

“We’re getting on the fucking train to nowhere!” Clara is half shouting and laughing, giddy with song, as she steps through the hissing doors. “Because my Ella is come back to me!”

You can hardly walk,  because you’re both wrapped around each other, stumbling and catching, stumbling and catching like a drunken pair. Behind the both of you, Darvell and Frank make solemn, stiff conversation.

“It wasn’t intentional, meeting you and Darvell like this,” you tell her.

“Oh, Ella. Don’t be so straight-laced. This is a joyful occasion.”

Frank and Darvell stay in one compartment, while the both of you go to the tail end of the train. It’s getting dark outside, the city blending into a continuous silhouette of jagged lines.

“We could leave those two behind, you know,” says Clara. “I still prefer it when it was just the two of us. It was the best of times, wasn’t it?”

“Not always.”

“Your honesty,” she continues, “is what I find endearing about you. Sometimes.”

If the windows were open, you might be able to feel the wind. The train is a knife, hewing through time. There is no end.

“How's things with you and that pair of sodden wellies?”

“What do you mean?”

Clara jerks her chin toward the front of the train. “Don't be thick, Ella. Who the fuck else do you run around with?”

“Frank is fine and we are perfectly happy. Someday I hope we can stop moving about and stay in one place, preferably somewhere with a public library.”

“You still writing your stories?”

“I do still write.”

“Why?”

“Because I believe I am worth remembering. I stopped awhile after Frank was turned. But it's better this way. I don't ever want to forget a place, a time, a moment ever again.” You pull your hands out of hers and stare straight into her gaze. Hard. “Not even Ruthven.”

The name sends a spasm through her jaw. Her face softens. She looks so terribly wounded for a split second. “Ella. Don't let him live on in that labyrinthine head of yours.”

“No,” you say. You have courage because she's here with you. “He's dead. You made sure of it.”

Clara leans back against the seat. “Let's get off at the next stop. I've got a sparkling feeling about the next stop.”

“You and Darvell should go.” You don't break off eye contact with her.

But you can see she's about to burst into tears. Her hand brushes across her eyelashes, specks of mascara on her skin.

“Sure. You're a big girl. I promised I'd let you go. So go.” She straightens her back and reaches across to you, tucks a strand of hair behind your ears. “But remember that we’re the only ones of our kind. We’re different from the rest of them. We’re women. Only a woman can be a soucriant. Only a woman can be so hated.”

Here is the thing about Clara: your muse, your burden. She has given you everything. She has taken everything from you. She is author and authority and you would rather die by her hand than die any other death. Even a death that does not come. But she is also a trap. What if she sinks her hands into you again? What if, in answer, you pick-axe your talon into her wrist and cling just as tightly? How much of yourself will there be left? Enough to pine for her presence long after you inevitably break away from her again.

“Glasgow,” you say. “The next stop is Glasgow.”

Frank wakes up in the middle of the night, facing you. You stroke his cheek, feeling the bones of his face. He kisses your palm.

“Hey,” he says. “Where is your mother?"

 

\-----

 

Once, you found her at an inn, in the middle of a song, hair tumbling over her face and dress pulled low. Every now and then she would break off singing to laugh and the men surrounding her were clapping, jeering as she moved to straddle their laps. The hunger in the way her mouth nicked upwards was so strong, far surpassing the hunger of the men she entertained. How could they not see that?

You went inside and she saw you. Her voice cut off, sharp and sudden.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” she said and hitched her skirts up and strode through the disgruntled crowd. She didn’t even stop as she swooped for your wrist and hauled you outside. “I don’t want to see you in a place like this, Ella.”

You’d seen her temper many times by then, but she’d never been this angry with you.

(The most wrathful she’d ever been was the very first night you met her properly, when she came surging down the corridor of the orphanage, bursting through the doors, her skirts a flame of movement, and her whole body gunning for Ruthven who only had the chance to cry out once before she tore his voice out.)

But you threw your arms around her neck and inhaled the smell of her skin and hair and clothes. The scents of work clung to her body: the sweat of men, ale, whiffs of bergamot and lemon oil.

“Go home,” said Clara, relenting. “I'll be back in the morning with some money. I can buy you a little gift. Wasn't it your birthday last week? How about I get you a little silk purse? Or a new notebook for you to write in? How about that, Ella?”

“No.” You would stay out here the whole night if you had to, and there wasn't a thing she could do.

“Alright,” she said, exasperated. “I'll come with you, alright? And we can be dirt poor for another fucking day.”

“We have each other, though.”

She laughed. She out her arm around you and pulled you close. “Where did you get this sweet mournful mouth of yours, child? Because it certainly wasn't from me. Heaven only knows mine is bitter and sharp and tired from trying to keep you alive all these years.”

 

 

\-----

 

 

Frank doesn’t have your patience when it comes to feeding. The thirst in him is young, mad with impulse. He fails, many times.

Many times, you find him crouching beside a red-stained corpse.

“May light shine upon you,” you say, kneeling beside him. Perhaps you are speaking to him, perhaps to the body. You aren’t quite sure.

Frank looks at you, tormented.

“I didn’t mean this,” he falters. “It’s too -- too-- it’s impossible. What you do, it’s impossible.”

“It takes time,” you answer. You think of Anne, the little girl with the doll, all that time ago, when you, like Frank, had less control over yourself. “You have time.”

“ _They_ don't.” He gestures toward the corpse.

Seeing Frank with his blood-spattered kill stirs your own hunger. You walk along the streets, your feet knowing the way, until you end up at the gate of an aged care home. You’ve been here before. There will be those ready for harvesting. You have sowed your stories in them, and they will see your face and believe.

People have their truths, their myths, their urban legends, their local lore. They have names too, for all sorts of things. Revenants. Wraiths. Guardians. Those who hover above thresholds. Those who ferry others across rivers.

But the name that you remember best was the one uttered by an elderly woman with a walker and a brightly beaded bag she was very fond of. Her name was Jemma, and she was born in Trinidad, but was spending her last days in an aged care home when you met her.

“You’re the soucouyant,” she said. “I’ll be damned.”

“I’m not here to condemn anyone,” you explained to her.

“I don’t see a way to salt you or make you count rice. And you sure as hell look like a shabby schoolgirl with that ratty old jumper but you’re a soucouyant. You’re here to take life.”

“Only from those who are tired of life.”

“Nicest soucouyant I ever heard. You must go hungry.” Jemma pushed her walker away and it rolled down the slope and tipped over. “Well I’m ready, little girl soucouyant.”

“Are you quite sure?” you asked.

“You know the answer to that, girl. You came for me.”

People don’t forget your eyes. When they look at you, the soucriant looks back at them through your eyes. They see hollows, islands, birds in the wind. The next time they see you, years and years later, they accept their fate. Often, you re-introduce yourself, just in case they’ve forgotten. You always wait until they are ready. But in the end, this is what you are: an eater. You take all those who ask for it: the infirm, the suicidal, the ones who beg for a dignified ending. You never renege on a promise. Feeding is slow, tormenting, a process that aggravates your hunger rather than satiates it. But you know the orphan’s song. You know what hunger is.

 

\-----

 

The Nameless Saint is expecting you when you enter its shrine. Like before, it takes your shape, your old nightdress, with the bloodstains on the lap. Ruthven leaps to corrosive life in your head. You exhale. He frays away. Dead. There is only the Saint.

“Eleanor Webb,” it says, “my finest child yet.”

You are not afraid. The soucriant in you has eaten away your fear.

“You remember me, then.”

The Saint’s reply: “Eleanor Webb. You lack your mother’s passion and her strength to outlive her bitterest enemies. But you have so much more.”

“Do you remember everyone who comes to you?”

“When you come back here again, Eleanor Webb,” says the Saint, “you will find an island and no shrine. Rocks and no water. You will find birds and none of their shouting. The sea and no shore in sight. Even a soucriant must tire of being a soucriant.”

The Saint has started to bleed. Dark red runnels fork and frill from its throat (your throat). Its dress turns black. Its face puckers. The lines in flesh crust over. Its hair blanches, turns stringy and sparse. Shoulders curl like a dead leaf.

“Eleanor Webb,” says the Saint. “Bring me another and maybe the both of us won’t go hungry again.”

“I cannot think of anyone who would be willing to come,” you answer. “Do you have a name, Nameless Saint?”

“I do,” says the Saint, and its hands are fine-fingered grey bones, and its lips crumble to grit, “and it is Eleanor Webb.”

 

\-----

 

Fourteen years after you tell Frank to go on without you, you let the brotherhood catch you. Frank will be back, but Clara -- Clara you’ve lost. You’ve become clever enough to shake her off your trail far. She’s probably proud of you.

The man from the brotherhood is alone. His sword is an oily arc in the night. This part of the city is deserted, and you and him are in a dead-end alley stacked with rubbish.

“Two hundred and sixty-five years,” he hisses, his knuckles tightening around the hilt, “you’ve been evading the brotherhood. You are disorder. You are an aberration, and nature always corrects an aberration.”

You notice Darvell, approaching around the corner of the building, expressionless.

“I’ve heard all about you,” says the man from the brotherhood, oblivious, a note of wonder in his voice, “about how your cunt of a mother stole her life and yours too.”

“You shouldn’t have come alone,” you say.

He knocks you down to your knees. “First, you. Then, your mother.”

You hear the sound you’ve been waiting for. The scream of your name, assonance stretched raw in a familiar mouth. You hear her hysteria, the murder in her voice, and that age-old anger.

The man from the brotherhood spins around. In a flash, you’re on your feet. You catch his chin with your hand and turn it sharply to face you. He snarls and raises his sword. He won’t have the time. Darvell is nearly upon him, but Clara will reach you first.

You look upon his face, the face of the brotherhood. _Always start with your name._

You say: “I’m Eleanor Webb.”

So you are.

  
  


 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I found this story sitting in my drafts folder - I'd started writing it four years ago or so. Anyway I rewrote it and finished and am posting here now in this teeny tiny dead fandom lol. 
> 
>  
> 
> But thank you for reading! :) Much appreciates! I can be found semi-alive on [tumblr](http://anagrammaddict.tumblr.com) @anagrammaddict


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